Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N'Roll

440 Pages·2013·2.21 MB·English

by  Lester Bangs

First Anchor Edition, January 2003
Copyright © 1987 by The Estate of Lester Bangs
Introduction Copyright © by Greil Marcus
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in
the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
New York, in 1987, and subsequently in trade paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York, in 1998.
Many of the essays in this work were originally published in Creem. Copyright © 1970, 1971,
1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1986 by Creem. Reprinted by permission
Owing to limitations of space, all other acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously
published material will be found in Permissions Acknowledgments.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bangs, Lester.
Psychotic reactions and carburetor dung.
1. Rock music—History and criticism. I. Marcus,
Greil. II. Title.
ML3534.B315 1988 784.5’4’009 88-40180
eISBN: 978-0-8041-5016-3
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction and Acknowledgments
Dedication
PART ONE | Two Testaments
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: A Tale of These Times (1971)
Astral Weeks (1979)
PART TWO | Blowing It Up
Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or,
Who’s the Fool? (1970)
James Taylor Marked for Death (1971)
Do the Godz Speak Esperanto? (1971)
PART THREE | Creemwork—Frauds, Failures, and Fantasies
Chicago at Carnegie Hall, Volumes I, II, III & IV (1972)
Black Oak Arkansas: Keep the Faith (1972)
White Witch (1972)
John Coltrane Lives (1972)
The Guess Who: Live at the Paramount (1972)
James Taylor: One Man Dog (1973)
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, or, The Day the
Airwaves Erupted (1973)
Jethro Tull in Vietnam (1973)
Screwing the System with Dick Clark (1973)
Slade: Sladest (1973)
My Night of Ecstasy with the J. Geils Band (1974)
Johnny Ray’s Better Whirlpool (1975)
Barry White: Just Another Way to Say I Love You (1975)
Kraftwerkfeature (1975)
David Bowie: Station to Station (1976)
PART FOUR | Slaying the Father
from Untitled Notes on Lou Reed, 1980
Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or, How I Slugged It Out with Lou Reed and Stayed
Awake (1975)
How to Succeed in Torture Without Really Trying, or, Louie Come Home, All Is Forgiven (1976)
The Greatest Album Ever Made (1976)
from Untitled Notes on Lou Reed, 1980
PART FIVE | Slaying the Children, Burying the Dead, Signs of Life
Iggy Pop: Blowtorch in Bondage (1977)
I Saw God and/or Tangerine Dream (1977)
Where Were You When Elvis Died? (1977)
Peter Laughner (1977)
The Clash (1977)
Richard Hell: Death Means Never Having to Say You’re Incomplete (1978)
Growing Up True Is Hard to Do (1978)
The White Noise Supremacists (1979)
Sham 69 Is Innocent! (1979)
New Year’s Eve (1979)
Otis Rush Mugged by an Iceberg (1980)
Thinking the Unthinkable About John Lennon (1980)
A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise (1981)
PART SIX | Unpublishable
Fragments, 1976–1982
from Notes on PiL’s Metal Box, 1980
from “All My Friends Are Hermits,” 1980
Review of Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway: Journeys & Arrivals of American Musicians (1980)
from Notes for Review of Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway, 1980
from “The Scorn Papers,” 1981
from “Women on Top: Ten Post-Lib Role Models for the Eighties,” a book proposal, 1981
from “Maggie May,” 1981
PART SEVEN | Untitled
from Untitled Notes, 1981
Permissions Acknowledgments
Introduction and
Acknowledgments
“BIO: Lester Bangs was born in Escondido, California, in 1948. He grew
up in El Cajon, California, which means ‘The Box’ in Spanish, where he
did things like wash dishes, sell women’s casuals, and work as assistant
for a husband-and-wife artificial-flower-arranging team while freelancing
record reviews and pretending to go to college until 1971, when he
moved to Detroit and went to work for Creem magazine. In the five years
he worked there as head staff writer and in various editorial capacities,
he defined a style of critical-journalism based on the sound and language
of rock ’n’ roll which ended up influencing a whole generation of
younger writers and perhaps musicians as well. In 1976 he quit Creem to
move to New York City and freelance. Since then he has also led two
rock ’n’ roll bands active on the Manhattan club scene, and began
cutting records of his original rock ’n’ roll compositions (he writes lyrics,
sings lead and plays harmonica, allowing that ‘All my melodies are the
same melody, and that’s a blues’), the first of which, ‘Let It Blurt’/‘Live,’
was released on the Spy label early in 1979. Presently he is preparing an
album …”
So wrote Lester Bangs a year or two before he died in 1982. The fact
of his death demands that any bio be more specific: he was born on 14
December 1948; he died on 30 April 1982, accidentally, due to
respiratory and pulmonary complications brought on by flu and
ingestion of Darvon. The name of the store where he sold women’s
casuals was Streicher’s Shoes, Mission Valley Shopping Center; his album
was released in 1981 on the Live Wire label, credited to Lester Bangs
and the Delinquents, under the title Juke Savages on the Brazos, though
he also thought of calling it “Jehovah’s Witness,” after the faith his
mother embraced following the death of his father in 1955. “Lester said
it accounted for his approach as a rock critic,” Frances Pelzman wrote
me as work began on this book, “because he was always trying to make
converts.” The fact of death also provokes idle speculation: of all the
details he might have included in a one-paragraph autobiography, why
did Lester mention that El Cajon means “The Box”? Was it because “box”
is old hipster slang for record player, or because the name signified a
confinement he thought he could never escape?
It’s not easy to write about a dead friend without veering off into
melodrama or sentimentality; melancholy might be the most honest
tone, but it’s the hardest to catch. I should be making a case for the
importance of Lester Bangs’s work, explaining precisely why those who
did not know it in its time should read it, why that work will enrich the
life of anyone willing to meet it even halfway on its own terms, and
while I believe Lester’s writing will do exactly that, I have no heart for
the job. It seems condescending, both to the reader and to the writing; it
pains me that Lester found it necessary to tout his work on the basis of
its influence, real and even overwhelming as that influence was, rather
than on the basis of its value. Another self-portrait, then, from about the
same time as the first: “I was obviously brilliant, a gifted artist, a
sensitive male unafraid to let his vulnerabilities show, one of the few
people who actually understood what was wrong with our culture and
why it couldn’t possibly have any future (a subject I talked about/gave
impromptu free lessons on incessantly, especially when I was drunk,
which was often, if not every night), a handsome motherfucker, good in
bed though of course I was so blessed with wisdom beyond my years and
gender that I knew this didn’t even make any difference, I was fun, had a
wild sense of humor, a truly unique and unpredictable individual, a
performing rock ’n’ roll artist with a band of my own, perhaps a
contender if not now then tomorrow for the title Best Writer in America
(who was better? Bukowski? Burroughs? Hunter Thompson? Gimme a
break. I was the best. I wrote almost nothing but record reviews, and not
many of those.…” He was half-kidding until the parenthesis began (he
never closed it); then he was telling the truth. Perhaps what this book
demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in
America could write almost nothing but record reviews.
I don’t really know about the claims preceding the parenthesis. Like
thousands of other people, I knew Lester mostly through his writing. We
were, perhaps, deep friends, but never close. I was his first editor, at
Rolling Stone in 1969; after he left California for Detroit and New York,
we saw one another half a dozen times, talked on the phone twice as
often, corresponded twice more than that. We spoke often of my editing
a book of his work; thus this one.
The first bio quoted above is from the manuscript of a collection of
Lester’s published pieces on rock ’n’ roll he prepared in 1980 or 1981.
The only publication he had been able to secure had been through a
German company, for publication only in German; the working title was
“Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.” This is not that book, which
never appeared, though the title is the same, the dedication is Lester’s,
and most of his selections and some of his section headings have been
retained; an enormous amount of material has been added, much of it
never published before. Lester’s book was meant to merely sum up one
period in what was to be a long and unpredictable career. (When Lester
died, he was about to leave for Mexico to write a novel, “All My Friends
Are Hermits,” though I don’t for a minute believe, as some people far
closer to Lester than I ever was have said, that he would have
abandoned writing about music.) His book was not meant to define a
legacy, which is what this book has to do.
Lester bought his first record (TV Action Jazz by Mundell Lowe and His
All-Stars, RCA Camden) in 1958; from then on he devoured every piece
of sound-bearing plastic he could find. “My most memorable childhood
fantasy,” he once wrote, “was to have a mansion with catacombs
underneath containing, alphabetized in endless winding dimly-lit musty
rows, every album ever released.” About the same time, he became a
constant reader; soon after, he became a teenage beatnik. Jack Kerouac
and William Burroughs were his heroes and teachers; he bought their
myths of dissipation and redemption, dope and satori. Their books and
everyone’s records made him a writer.
Lester Bangs’s first published words, discounting poems in high-school
literary magazines, were a review of the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams LP,
Rolling Stone, 5 April 1969. It came in over the transom, a brutal,
unanswerable attack, because as a rock ’n’ roll fan Lester had followed
the hype, bought the album, felt cheated and used, and struck back: a
good beginning for any critic. (Later he came to love the record and the
band, but that was typical: “I double back all over myself,” he said in an
interview with Jim DeRogatis, who had asked him if his approach to
rock ’n’ roll was based on the conviction that the music wasn’t art: “We
can talk about the trash esthetic, all that.… Of course it’s art.”) In June
1969 Lester and I began to work together; in one of the first letters he
wrote me (covering the five, ten, fifteen reviews then arriving weekly)
he said: “In short, I would like to blow up the whole set and start all
over again.” And so he did.
Lester published more than a hundred and fifty reviews in Rolling
Stone (from 1969 to 1973, when editor Jann Wenner banned him for
disrespect toward musicians; again in 1979, when record-review editor
Paul Nelson demanded his reinstatement), but Rolling Stone was never
his place of freedom. Creem, the rock ’n’ roll magazine that grew out of
the milieu around John Sinclair’s White Panther Party, was that place, at
least for a time: it gave Lester space for the farthest reaches of invective,
scorn, fantasy, rage, and glee. First as a contributor and soon as an
editor, he made the magazine work as a subversive undertow in the
inexorable commercial flow of the rock business; along with editor Dave
Marsh, he discovered, invented, nurtured, and promoted an esthetic of
joyful disdain, a love for apparent trash and contempt for all pretension,
that in 1976 and 1977, with the Ramones and CBGB’s in New York City
and the Sex Pistols in London, would take the name he had given it:
punk. He was also a man with a job, covering the scene, scooping up
whatever was there: between 1970 and 1976, Creem meant more than a
hundred and seventy reviews, seventy feature articles, countless picture
captions (some of his best work, a demystification of superstars that led
as directly to the Ramones and the Sex Pistols as did his reviews and
features), countless replies to readers’ letters, taking out the trash.
Lester became a figure within the world of rock ’n’ roll: within its
confines, he became a celebrity. Doping and drinking, wisecracking and
insulting, cruel and performing, always good for a laugh, he became
rock’s essential wild man, a one-man orgy of abandon, excess, wisdom,
satire, parody—the bad conscience, acted out or written out, of every
band he reviewed or interviewed. He went to an interview ready to
provoke whatever band was in town; whatever band was in town tried
to provoke him. Thus by the time he moved to New York—to find a
burgeoning punk scene that seemed on the verge of fulfilling all his
hopes and jeremiads—he was a man to be lionized: a man you could be
proud to say you’d bought a drink or given drugs.
Lester had spent his last year of high school on a strange regimen of
Romilar cough syrup and belladonna. When a doctor told him he was
courting death, he switched to shooting speed. He became an alcoholic,
a real one; after many years, he could stink up a room. He stayed away
from street drugs (LSD, cocaine, whatever whatever was called at any
given time); he never used heroin. Still, he was for a long time his own
kind of junkie. In his last year, he had cleaned up; hardly any drugs,
little more than a beer, which often brought on a paroxysm of self-hate.
He joined Alcoholics Anonymous; he had work to do. I’ve always
believed that the violence of his attempt to change his life left his body
shaken, vulnerable to even the slightest anomaly, be it a commonplace
bug or an ordinary dose of anyone else’s everyday painkiller; that he had
shocked his system toward health and that that was what killed him.
In Detroit and especially in New York, Lester had an image to live up
to; sometimes he tried to live up to it, and sometimes he fought against
it. He doubled back on himself again and again. But the shift in his
writing from Detroit to New York is patent. In Detroit he published
mostly first drafts, hewing to the Beat line of automatic inspiration; in
New York he began to work more slowly, writing a piece again and
again, chasing a theme through five, ten times its publishable length,
then cutting back or starting over. Moralism in the very best sense—the
attempt to understand what is important, and to communicate that
understanding to others in a form that somehow obligates the reader as
much as it entertains—surfaced at the end of his tenure at Creem, and
found a field in New York at the Village Voice. At the same time he
published in obscure fanzines and newsstand slicks and daily
newspapers, but his public voice remained stymied, boxed in: he was a
rock critic, so what was all this other stuff, all the pages on sex, love,